Category Archives: Content Marketing

New year, new you. How about a new approach to online sales, too? In 2017, it’s all about the targeted efforts to promote your business and gain customers.

You need to develop a content marketing strategy that works. This is why all big or competitive companies now have content creation managers and directors. This aspect is vital and it requires the converging powers of various professionals. Here are the top 7 reasons why you must invest in this as soon as possible if you’re promoting your business online:

1.) Content marketing is cost effective

Although it may seem expensive at first, content marketing is an umbrella concept that covers many crucial aspects. It boosts organic traffic but also engagement, so it gets you more committed visitors and customers. In the long run, it can increase your revenue exponentially.

2.) Customer loyalty is increased

Your site visitors want consistency and quality through and through. Once they see it, they return to your website. Through a sound marketing strategy, it is made to suit their queries and provide them with the information or solutions they’ve been seeking for.

3.) Content becomes shareable

When your brand has content that inspires people to share it, your business can become viral. It gets a visibility boost, which in turn gets you more customers. Shareable content is extremely effective and its benefits can spiral outward for spectacular results.

4.) Amplified ROI

Because content marketing touches and improves so many areas, any of these becomes powerful enough to boost the return. Thus, the money you’re spending on such strategy can come back as a much amplified return of investment.

5.) Reaching key demographics

A good strategy does not mean only increasing traffic. It’s about targeting the right demographics, based on criteria like age, gender, professional status, industry or geographic region. When your website shows high up in search results, it shows to the people who matter – the ones with the highest chance to become your customers.

6.) It’s better than ads

Traditional advertizing no longer earns people’s trust. A percentage as high as 90% of people looking for products and services are rather convinced by recommendations or by good content. This is why it’s essential to market your content (which must be helpful, informative and relevant) instead of investing in ad creation and other such types of customer persuasion.

7.) Satisfying the need for information

We are all looking for information on a constant basis. This is especially valid when searching for products or services. We want to see how these are able to help us. Through content marketing, businesses meet people’s desire for information. Firstly, your goal should be to inform individuals, then to educate or inspire. Selling comes later.

Your brand’s position benefits greatly from professional content marketing. Your website becomes useful and authentic to its niche. It’s the way to keep up with online audiences and their ever changing behaviors. Act now and you might actually be saving money on your marketing strategies.

If you really want to make an impact on the online business sphere today, then you need to be ready to learn the various facets of internet advertising and web presence. An essential part of this process will be figuring out the best content marketing concepts for your needs. Different people will have different requirements when it comes to offering the right amount of content, at the right times, in the right locations. However, one thing that all content must have in common is that it is relevant, useful and valuable to your reader.

Once, it was easy enough to pack your blogs and articles full of the right keywords, therefore manipulating search engines to place you at the very top of the results pages. Today however, achieving online success is far more complicated. It requires a direct focus on producing excellent quality posts that your readers will enjoy, and generating organic visibility. Part of this will require you to establish a relationship with your clients, which allows them to trust you, show interest in your products, and give you the valuable interaction that you need. Here are a few ways to do that.

1.) Conduct Surveys

If you have a reasonable amount of visitors approaching your website on a regular basis, or various connections through social media outlets such as Facebook and LinkedIn, you could find that running surveys is incredibly useful. By asking your readership directly about what they’re interested in, what they care about, and what they would like to see, you are showing your audience that your company puts them first. Conduct surveys that are relevant to your needs or business, and publish the results regularly on your website, alongside personal commentary.

There are plenty of tools for creating free surveys available online today, as well as options that are offered by LinkedIn and Facebook directly.

2.) Write an FAQ

Take some time to sit down with your team and establish the questions that appear most often in regard to your services or products. A frequently asked questions sections can be incredibly useful, as it helps to develop organic visibility, and offers a way to make customer service simpler.

If you have quite a few questions in mind, and the answers are going to be somewhat complex, you should consider developing a system where the questions are on one page, and the question is repeated with the answer beneath on another page. This will not only make the process of reading simpler, but it will also help to boost your search results by focusing on each HTML page separately.

3.) Newsletters

They may seem like old-school forms of contact today, but newsletters are just as useful now as they have ever been. Having a newsletter is a great way to make sure you’re keeping in touch with your current prospects, clients and more. Newsletters also deliver new opportunities for you to add content to your website, as you can add the content from the newsletter into a certain section or page. It’s a good idea to include a HTML version of your newsletter that makes it easy for people to see what you’re offering and what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t forget, newsletters should be:

Content is the root of all internet marketing campaigns. In order to have a successful campaign, you need to produce high quality content that attracts users. Even further, the contents need to be optimized for SEO. Forget about flooding the articles with keywords and links; here are a number of things you can actually do to optimize your content even further.

Top Trends and User Searches

In order to optimize your site’s content for SEO purposes, you need to first understand how your users search for information. Tools such as Google Analytics and SEOMoz can help you get the insight you need to begin.

After finding the top keywords and phrases that users use to find your articles, you can continue by taking a number of simple steps.

See what search phrases competitors are getting. You can use the same tools to perform competitor analysis.

Adjust your articles to better suit your users. Instead of targeting generic phrases such as “travel insurance”, you can focus on more user-specific keywords such as the ones mentioned above.

Depending on the site you are running, you can also produce contents that match the latest trends. Creating a story that goes well with trending keywords can really help boost your site’s traffic and SEO performance in general.

Content Optimization for Search Engines

Identifying how your users search for information is just the first step towards optimizing your contents for SEO. Next, you need to start writing and posting content in order to be more visible on search results. There are a few tips you can use to get started right away, including:

Create a content schedule and be consistent. Search engines value websites that are updated regularly. Instead of posting blog posts sporadically, keep a tight schedule and update your site regularly.

Use headlines, page titles, subtitles and URLs to your advantage. These web elements are rated higher than the rest of the articles. By placing keywords as these elements, you can gain better search engine rankings much faster.

Don’t hesitate to use additional tools to review the content before posting. Yoast for WordPress is a good example of how an SEO tool doesn’t have to be complicated. Even when you don’t have prior experience in doing SEO audits, the tools you use will point you towards the right direction.

Don’t forget to also optimize content for local searches. Add country- or city-specific information to your article, particularly if you are targeting a specific market segment. Search engine crawlers will pick up these information and adjust your rankings accordingly.

As with any SEO effort, don’t forget to be consistent. You need to evaluate your efforts and make subtle adjustments to keep the SEO campaign effective, but posting contents consistently is still necessary. It is the only way you can stay ahead of your competitors and keep your pages appearing on search results.

The penguin algorithm is the recent update to google that has been dedicated to fighting back against the torrents of spam that typically overwhelm quality content online. The third version of this algorithm hopes to continue improving the world of digital marketing, predicted to validate the numerous days of hard work that digital marketers have put into making their online presence more quality-driven.

The Google Penguin algorithm was designed to target backlinks of poor quality to websites, such as those generated by forum posts, article exchanges, purchased backlinks and low quality directories. The latest update has targeted commercial anchor text that underlines commercial terms instead of the necessary brand names required, such as advertising a link to ‘Apple’ through ‘computers’.

The second version of the Penguin algorithm was released last October, and made a huge difference to search results and Google feedback for many industries. Since then, companies have been working extremely hard to fight back against negative links and update their current targets to meet with Google’s standards. With that in mind, 3.0 should have pretty significant results.

The Recent Google updates

Over the recent years, Google has been constantly updating its various search algorithms, shifting what people have to do to get better rankings online. Google has been attempting to make its search results more user-driven, which means that they want to provide browsers with the most satisfying and relevant results. Of course, it’s taken some time for Google to figure out exactly what to do with various updates to the system, and the chances are that we still have a lot to come in the way of progression. The recent updates that are most relevant to targeting spam include:

The Panda algorithm

The Payday loans algorithm

The Penguin algorithm

The Panda algorithm was first launched in 2011, to target content on websites that was considered to be of low quality. Following penguin, this update has had one of the largest effects on search marketing and content marketing over the recent three years. The panda update tends to refresh on a monthly basis, with new rules coming in to play regularly.

The Payday loans algorithm was launched in an attempt to cut down on some of the more spam-oriented websites on the internet. Studies and surveys over time showed that gambling websites, payday loans websites, and sex-industry based sites had the biggest impact on spam levels overall across the world wide web. These industries included a lot of blackhat SEO tactics, which lead Google to fight back with more aggressive means in 2013.

Finally, Penguin is perhaps the update that has provided the biggest impact to the online marketing world. The Penguin update first saw light in the spring of 2012, and it was created to target the backlinks that have been considered spam, and bringing down the level of high-quality SEO for more than ten years now. Today, Penguin is the algorithm that sets the bar for websites these days, allowing them to measure their success according to their search engine results.

Over the recent years, the internet has been flooded with articles on how to use content marketing, and why it’s so important as a valuable part of your online selling campaign. However, the truth is that content marketing is nothing new, though people are only just learning how to do it right. For some time now, Google has been emphasizing the necessity of good quality content, and this doesn’t just mean content that has been packed full of search-engine-optimized words. It’s content that your users, as well as the search engine bots, are going to want to read. If your users think that the content you are putting out is informational and valuable, then they’re more likely to share it with more viewers and increase your potential reach.

The Google Algorithm

Various websites have begun to be penalized by the updates of the google algorithm over time. Most recently, companies have been suffering serious repercussions as a result of using duplicate content or text that possessed no valuable information. Once upon a time, it was fine to write content that tailored specifically to google and no-one else, but the truth is that Google is not the factor that will lead to your next sale or lead. The internet thrives on information, and every day the online network is becoming more competitive, with content appearing in the form of:

Blogs

Guest posting

News

Articles

Social media

So how do you use content that you know is really going to work?

Provide unique, quality content

Every piece of content that your website publishes should be unique. This means that you cannot simply copy one article from a blog, to a website, to your next news article. Even if the first article got a lot of views or positive responses, you’ll get penalized for using duplications. On top of this, make sure that any content you put out there is worth reading. Quantity may be important in some circumstances, but nothing is more crucial than quality. Use content writers who have a good understanding of the way the English language works, and make sure that they are capable of using punctuation correctly throughout. The lower your content quality is, the less likely you are to attract customers.

Utilizing the right format can also be important in producing quality content. If you choose to copy and paste content directly from a word processing program that you have been using, you may find that this embeds a lot of extra code in the document. If you want to ensure that this doesn’t happen, you can copy content into notepad before posting it on your blog or content management system. Furthermore, content should utilize the correct use of lists, subheadings and pictures to ensure that you are not simply presenting your audience with a singular block of text, as some people find this difficult to read. Allow your readers the opportunity to scan through the content you have provided to find the exact information that they need.

These days, useful engaging content should be at the very core of your marketing strategy. Consumers across the world are capable of skipping past television advertising, ignoring pictures in magazines and completely disregarding online banners, so your content must be something the average user wants to see. Content marketing is a technique that creates and distributes relevant, valuable, and consistent content to appropriately acquire a defined audience and drive the potential for profitable customer action. It has become an increasingly popular strategy that assists businesses in actively interacting with their consumers, and the great thing about content marketing is that once the attention of an audience has been captured, then it is generally easier to convince them to take the desired action. However, like any other form of marketing, there are still areas in content where you can go wrong, and knowing the most common mistakes can make them easier to avoid further down the line.

Mistake 1: Avoid Getting To Know Your Audience

Before you begin investing in content marketing, it is essential that you figure out exactly who your intended audience is going to be. If you don’t understand the people that you are reaching out to, you are more likely to create content that is unhelpful, irrelevant, and uninteresting. Take the time to do some research on your target audience, find out:

Their age

Their general whereabouts (United States, England, Global, etc.)

What they like and dislike

What kind of questions they are asking

What they are looking for

The way in which they interact with each other

Having this information will provide a great foundation for you to build content that your audience will want to see.

Mistake 2: Choosing Quantity Over Quality

Some people seeking the service of content marketers get too caught up in the idea of generating as many backlinks as possible without actually taking the quality of the content into consideration. The issue here is that content marketing should be about providing engaging, valuable information to your readers, encouraging them to continue engaging with your website or business. Offering poorly written content is more likely to have a negative effect on your reputation as a brand, and drive your customers away.

Mistake 3: Neglecting to Promote Your Content

It is important to remember when it comes to content marketing, that posting plenty of brilliantly written, useful content is a useful endeavour if your intended audience is never going to see it. You should always try to find new ways of promoting your content to increase its visibility, and remember that once you have posted something new on your website or blog, it can be a great idea to share your update through social media channels. Sharing a link on Facebook, tweeting, or pinning content can make it visible to many new people, and you can also consider placing guest posts on other influential blogs to help boost your reputation. Remember to add a link to your website whenever you post information or blog posts elsewhere around the internet so that users can find you.

Mistake 4: Never Varying Your Content

Sometimes, when hiring online content marketers, individuals focus too heavily upon the content in terms of blog posts, without looking into the different kinds of marketing that can also be used. Infographics, YouTube videos, slide presentations, and podcasts can also be a great way to get your information out into the public eye, and the more you vary your content, the more likely it is to be fresh and interesting, keeping your readers engaged. You might consider repurposing a singular piece of content into different forms, such as breaking an e-book down into various blog posts or having a conversation about it on a podcast.